Last December’s release of the quadrennial “Plum Book,” the congressionally compiled list of top government jobs and supporting positions, contained a curiosity. In the section on the Defense Department’s top management, among the many jobs located in Arlington, Va., home to the Pentagon, was a notation for Shay Assad, director of Defense pricing policy. His location? Boston.

Assad, who has worked for Defense since 2004, was asked by to explain after a recent speech to a contractors group in Arlington. “My home portal,” he said, is at the pricing center at the Defense Contract Management Agency’s south Boston office. The decision to reside there, made when he ascended to the pricing job in June 2011, allowed the department to eliminate one Senior Executive Service position and three GS-15s from the Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy shop.

That would appear to make up for the costs of commuting to Washington, where Assad, who is career SES, is expected to spend about 25 percent of his time, according to a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Assad works directly for Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics on major programs, an arrangement made to “ensure that the entire organization and industry understood the importance of contract pricing,” the spokeswoman said. One of his chief responsibilities is to assist and advise DCMA Director Charlie Williams Jr. in the ”implementation of a departmentwide centralized DCMA pricing capability.”

Over time, the spokeswoman said, Assad “anticipates he will spend more time directly working with his counterparts in the field in the implementation of Better Buying Power Initiatives.”

In a previous life, Assad spent 22 years as an executive with Raytheon Co., based outside Boston in Waltham, and is a red-hot Red Sox fan. ”Of course,” he said, “I was happy to take the job.”

Charlie Clark joined Government Executive in the fall of 2009. He has been on staff at The Washington Post, Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, Time-Life Books, Tax Analysts, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the National Center on Education and the Economy. He has written or edited online news, daily news stories, long features, wire copy, magazines, books and organizational media strategies.

By using this service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or
otherwise objectionable. Although GovExec.com does not monitor comments posted to this site (and
has no obligation to), it reserves the right to delete, edit, or move any material that it deems
to be in violation of this rule.

Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

This research study aims to understand how state and local leaders regard their agency’s innovation efforts and what they are doing to overcome the challenges they face in successfully implementing these efforts.

The U.S. healthcare industry is rapidly moving away from traditional fee-for-service models and towards value-based purchasing that reimburses physicians for quality of care in place of frequency of care.